The field of medical information systems has been an expanding field for several decades. With increasing diagnostic tools, increasing population, more wide-spread access to medical treatment, and the desirability of sharing information between doctors and professionals, the field of medical information systems is likely to continue growing. To address this continued growth, and the subsequent inconveniences of paper and other fixed forms of clinical documents storage, the medical community has increasingly turned to digital forms of clinical document management.
To facilitate digitalization of clinical documents, the medical industry has created a number of standards and languages for managing clinical documents. Such standards typically integrate clinical documents generated by medical hardware from multiple manufacturers. These standards facilitates managing and sharing of documents amongst various entities in the industry such as a private physician's office to a clinic to an acute care in-patient facility and other personal health record systems. However, there are varying standards being used in the industry, and varying standards may not be necessarily compatible with one another, and a system created in accordance with one standard may not be compatible with another system created in accordance with another standard.
A document consumer may need to search and retrieve data from multiple datacenters. However, each datacenter is independent, self-contained, and may not be able to directly communicate with other datacenters. Instead, each datacenter may communicate with a network control hub to share and obtain information from other datacenters. This configuration may also be viewed as a hub and spoke configuration wherein the hub is the control center to where each datacenter (spokes) are linked.
Another problem a document consumer may face when searching and retrieving data from multiple datacenters is that data in various datacenters may not be in the same format as in the document consumer. For example, the serial number in one domain could be in a six-digit format (e.g. 123456) while in another domain, the serial number may be alpha-numeric (e.g. AB1111). In another example, the patient identification number assigned to a particular patient may be different in various datacenters.
Another problem a document consumer may face when searching and retrieving data from multiple datacenters is the datacenters may not be compatible with the syntax that the document consumer operates. For example, the document consumer may be operating in a first language and the datacenter in a second language, and the first language and the second language are not compatible with one another.
Accordingly there is a need for a method, a system and/or an apparatus that addresses at least some of the concerns in the existing prior art.